Streetsblog New York City

Reconnecting America's new Transit Space Race map shows the abyss between the unbridled demand for transit and the very limited funding for it.

By the looks of it, my humble hometown of Washington, DC, is winning the transit space race. The region currently has 45 transit projects either planned or underway — and one that’s stalled. You may have heard of the Silver Line to Dulles Airport, but a new map from Reconnecting America proves that that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to transit starts in the DC area.

Every year, Reconnecting America comes out with a map of the “Transit Space Race,” with all the fixed-guideway projects that are in any phase of realization, from a “twinkle in the eye” to under construction.

“The 2013 edition of the map identifies 721 projects in 109 regions, up from 643 projects found in 109 regions in 2011,” the press release says. Then it seamlessly, almost coyly, gets to the real point of the project: to illustrate the desperate need for more federal transit funding.

“Of the current projects, 497 have a cost estimate,” RA says. “The total required to build just those 497 projects would be $250 billion.  At the current rate of federal transit investment, it would require more than 78 years to construct those projects.”

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Following the recent deaths of two subway passengers who were pushed onto tracks, TWU Local 100 is urging operators to slash train speeds as they enter stations, the New York Times reported yesterday. A TWU flier, which you can view here, advises operators that “Preventing a [run-over], and saving yourself the emotional trauma and potential loss of income that go with it, is worth a few extra minutes on your trip.”

There’s no question that watching death unfold through the train windshield and being powerless to avert it can result in trauma and guilt. But the proposed remedy in the TWU flier could be surprisingly costly. Based on calculations from my Balanced Transportation Analyzer spreadsheet model [PDF], if those “extra few minutes” were actually applied as a preventive measure to every subway trip, the lost time could aggregate to millions of hours per year for straphangers, not to mention more street and highway gridlock as the slowdown leads some commuters to drive instead of taking the train.

The city’s subways account for 1.6-1.7 billion passenger-trips a year. Here’s a rough sketch of the leading consequences from slowing all of them by an average of five percent:

• A 2.4 percent drop in subway ridership, as slower service discourages “marginal” train trips
• A nearly 4 percent rise in private auto trips into the Manhattan Central Business District, causing a 4 percent drop in average vehicle speeds there
• 1 percent fewer people coming to the CBD — a net decrease of 34,000 each day
• 55 million hours a year sacrificed to slower travel (35 million for transit users, 20 million for vehicle users), collectively costing them $1 billion a year, based on values of travel time
• A $60 million a year revenue hit to NYC Transit, or a $35 million net loss for the MTA after factoring in higher throughput on tolled bridges and tunnels

These figures do not reflect higher personnel and equipment costs to run additional trains to make up for the slowdown. Nor do they capture macro-economic effects of reduced business from the decline in CBD activity. Even so, they’re not chicken-feed.

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In his State of the State address tomorrow afternoon, Governor Andrew Cuomo has the opportunity to set the tone for transportation policy in the year ahead. And with the NYC region’s transit system having absorbed billions of dollars worth of damage from Hurricane Sandy, it’s going to be a very important year indeed. Cuomo has to chart a path to recover from the storm and prepare the region’s transit infrastructure for the future, all while maintaining the existing system, which is staggering under the load of excessive debt.

2012 was the year Andrew Cuomo moved forward on the transit-less Tappan Zee Bridge. Will 2013 be the year he focuses on transit in the wake of Hurricane Sandy? Photo: NYGovCuomo/Twitter

There are some smart ideas in the recently-leaked report from the NYS 2100 Commission, which Cuomo convened after Hurricane Sandy to address the state’s infrastructure needs. The final report is scheduled for official release tomorrow, but draft recommendations obtained by the New York Times suggest a range of transit and transportation investments the governor could pursue.

These include creation of a “world-class” bus rapid transit system, subway storm fortifications, and policy changes to dedicate funds to bicycling and walking. Also on the list: transit construction projects that have been in various stages of discussion or development for some time, like a new rail tunnel beneath the Hudson River and a connection to Penn Station for Metro-North.

The report recommends creating an infrastructure bank to finance capital investments — always a vague suggestion that could end up obscuring how projects are really funded — and an evaluation system to prioritize where dollars should go. But it’s up to the governor to decide which of the report’s recommendations he’d like to focus on.

So tomorrow’s speech should tell New Yorkers if Cuomo is finally going to make a resilient, effective, well-funded transit system a priority.

On top of the new projects identified in the NYS 2100 report, it would be good to see Cuomo address the basics. It can be easy to forget the $4.75 billion in recovery needs already identified by the MTA. Although the agency expects the federal government and its insurers to cover most of the cost, it’s still looking to borrow for about one-fifth of the tab. “That leaves the riders with $1 billion in additional bonding costs,” said Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign, who wants the governor to propose alternatives to more MTA debt.

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Happy New Year, transit riders! Thanks to some shrewd maneuvering on the part of some U.S. Senators, transit commuters will be able to claim as much in tax benefits as car commuters do in 2013.

Transit commuters could have a little extra change in their pockets in 2013, thanks to the fiscal cliff deal. Photo: Treehugger

Slipped into the fiscal cliff deal approved by the House of Representatives last night was a provision to boost the tax incentive to commute by transit. The commuting costs that straphangers could claim as tax-deductible had been reduced to a maximum of $125 per month last year, well below the $240 that car commuters could claim monthly to offset parking costs.

With transit and parking benefits again equal, there will be one less pernicious financial incentive to drive to work alone, as David Alpert at Greater Greater Washington noted:

In approving this extension, [Congress was] able to give many American workers a tax cut along with helping our cities function more effectively and ending one small example of the many ways government “picks winners and losers” among transportation modes.

The equalized tax incentive for transit was extended only though the end of the year, though, so electeds will again have to act to put transit on equal footing with driving.

Politico said the provision is expected to provide up to $190 million a year in incentives for transit riders. Good to see some smart policy came out of that messy, messy budget ordeal, which will continue to play out over the next few months, with plenty of implications for how Americans get around.

When New Yorkers go to the polls less than a year from now, they’ll definitely be voting for a new mayor, and they might also be voting for billions in state-backed transportation funding, if a measure put forward by Assembly Member James Brennan clears Albany.

The second time around: Assembly Member James Brennan wants to put a statewide transportation bond on the ballot in November.

Brennan, a Brooklyn Democrat representing Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, and Kensington, is reintroducing his bill for a $4.5 billion statewide transportation bond, evenly split between roads and transit. Starting in January, he’ll be making a push to sign up additional Assembly co-sponsors (there are now 16, all Democrats), and to find a sponsor for a Senate companion bill, with an eye toward recruiting Republican support.

“When we put it out there last year, we had no intention of passing it,” Brennan legislative director Lorrie Smith explained, saying that they wanted to begin circulating the issue in Albany before making a push in 2013. ”We’re taking the next step and trying to fashion a proposal that will go before voters in November.”

Some of the bond money is expected to go to the MTA’s next five-year capital program. Although that slate of maintenance and expansion work is still undefined (the current capital program runs through 2014), it’s likely this time around that keeping the system’s existing infrastructure in a state of good repair will be a higher priority than big-ticket projects like the 7-train expansion.

“We’re going to have to find different sources of revenue in order to find the capital necessary to sustain a state of good repair,” MTA Chairman Joe Lhota said earlier this year.

Although advocates welcomed the bill’s reintroduction, they cautioned that it is by no means a complete fix, for either the MTA or the state’s larger transportation system, which both have tens of billions of dollars in unfunded needs.

“We remain a little concerned that this might pass and voters and legislators might think that our funding needs have been resolved when, in fact, they have not,” said Tri-State Transportation Campaign Executive Director Veronica Vanterpool. Separately, both Tri-State and Transportation Alternatives said that Brennan’s proposal should be part of a larger revenue plan. Brennan himself said in April that the bond issue would still leave a hole of at least $6 billion in the capital program, even with federal matching funds taken into account.

While a more ambitious legislative package would address a heftier chunk of the MTA’s funding needs, it would also be tougher to enact.

“Brennan at the moment is the only game in town” because he’s “proposed something other than agency borrowing,” said Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign. The Brennan bond would be backed by general tax revenues, unlike much of the borrowing for the current capital plan, which is paid for out of the MTA’s operating budget. Moving borrowing from the MTA’s books to the state’s can take pressure off straphangers, who, absent initiative from Albany, are paying for debt service through fare hikes.

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A few quick thoughts on the news that MTA Chair Joe Lhota is going to leave the agency at the end of week to clear the way for a mayoral run…

Photo: MTA via WikiMedia Commons

There are basically two angles to consider. One is that the MTA is about to lose its chief executive, yet again, after a brief but effective tenure. When Lhota replaced Jay Walder at the end of 2010, the major concern was that the region was losing someone who rose through the ranks at the world’s most complex transit agencies and gaining a former deputy mayor with no transit jobs on his resume. Despite his lack of transit expertise, Lhota turned out to be a good person to have in charge. He kept making headway on Walder initiatives like the expansion of real-time transit data, and his handling of the post-Sandy recovery process produced a spectacularly rare outcome: a public relations victory for the MTA. If he’s using the MTA chair position as a springboard to politics, Lhota must have been doing something right. It won’t be easy for Andrew Cuomo to fill the void.

The other angle, which I think is more significant, is that a sitting MTA chair entering the mayoral race is bound to elevate transit as an electoral issue. We can speculate all day long about what a hypothetical Lhota mayoralty would mean for transit, but just by running, he’ll guarantee that trains and buses get more attention than in a typical NYC mayoral election, which tends to reduce transportation to a second- or third-tier issue.

We’ll see whether New York City voters get a substantive discussion of major transit issues — the MTA’s punishing debt burden, the opportunities to significantly improve the city’s surface transit network — or just an amplified version of the usual MTA blame game, with Lhota serving as the other candidates’ punching bag. But with Lhota in the mix, transit can’t be ignored in the 2013 campaign.

This woman waiting for the M4 in Washington Heights may have to wait a lot longer: it is the city's least reliable bus. Photo: Susan NYC/Flickr

Since 2006, Streetsblog has provided red carpet coverage of the annual Pokey and Schleppie awards, given out by the Straphangers Campaign and Transportation Alternatives to the city buses with the slowest average speed and the least reliable service, respectively. This year, Manhattan buses took the crown in both categories.

Although the awards spotlight the routes most notorious for crawling through traffic, stopping at every block, and bunched three in a row, there is a bright spot: Select Bus Service has been living up to its promises — with more routes set to get the speedier service in the coming years.

In the survey, the Bx12 SBS on Fordham Road and Pelham Parkway traveled at 7.9 mph, 19.6 percent faster than the Bx12 local’s 6.6 mph. Meanwhile, on First and Second Avenues in Manhattan, M15 Select buses moved along at 7.8 mph — 50 percent faster than the M15 local, which lumbered at 5.2 mph.

These numbers didn’t come from nowhere: Although not as robust as Bus Rapid Transit in other cities, SBS features limited-stop service, camera-enforced bus lanes, off-board fare collection and, in many cases, transit priority at stop lights. Buses without these improvements remain stuck in gridlock.

The result? This year, there is a tie for the Pokey award, with the M66 and M42 crosstown buses both clocking in at 3.9 mph. In a statement, Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign said these buses “would lose a race to an amusement park bumper car,” which can hit top speeds of 4.3 mph.

Straphangers and TA analyzed bus data citywide, and each borough has its very own Pokey award winner. The full list, plus the highly-anticipated Schleppie award results, after the jump.

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On Friday, state legislators in the Michigan House of Representatives made a momentous decision to approve a regional transit system for metro Detroit.

Regional transit in Detroit was boosted with a legislative win last week thanks to a diverse coalition, including Republican Gov. Rick Snyder and members of Detroit church congregations. Photo: Mlive.com

That event, preceded by Senate approval, was the culmination of 40 years of struggle to build a unified transit system for Detroit and its suburbs. It sets the stage for the merger of the region’s SMART buses, serving the suburbs, and DDOT, the transit provider for the city of Detroit — which should reduce the notorious delays and unreliability for everyone in the region who depends on transit.

But the news is even bigger than that. Approval of the regional transit authority for southeast Michigan will open the door to $25 million in promised federal funds to support either light rail or bus rapid transit on the Woodward Corridor through trendy Midtown. It also paves the way for a system of rapid buses running between destinations in the suburbs.

That would allow metro Detroit to quickly make up for a lot of lost ground on transit. And the region finally seems ready. Though Detroit’s faith-based organizations and social justice advocates were an indispensable part of the winning coalition, centrist and even conservative actors like Republican Governor Rick Snyder and the Michigan Suburbs Alliance were just as vocal in their support. And when the Michigan House of Representatives issued its historic vote late last week, it was Republicans — not Democrats — who led the charge.

Granted, that was mostly due to the fact that the issue became entangled with Right to Work legislation moving through the statehouse at the same time. But nevertheless, it was telling that Republicans in the statehouse were supportive enough to push the legislation forward, even with anemic Democratic support.

Public opinion on the subject of transit in the Motor City region has evolved dramatically in recent years. If the “old school” perspective on transit had a face, it would be that of Janice Daniels, a Tea Party insurgent elected mayor in the large, affluent suburb of Troy, Michigan, last year. As mayor, Daniels led a campaign to refuse $8.5 million in federal funds to build a transit center in the suburb. Her effort played on the racial fears that have prevented the region’s urban areas and suburbs from cooperating on a transit system for decades. At one City Council meeting on the subject, she hosted an “expert” who argued that the train station would serve as a “mugger hugger” and a “heroin express,” presumably from the city of Detroit.

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With BusTime set to expand citywide by the end of 2013, after launches in Staten Island, the Bronx and with pilot routes in Brooklyn and Manhattan, City Council members want to bring that technology to the streets — or more specifically, the bus stop — and are asking MTA, DOT and bus shelter operator Cemusa to help make it happen.

Council Member Brad Lander speaks at today's press conference. On the bus shelter behind him is a mock bus countdown clock. Photo: Stephen Miller

To that end, Council Member Brad Lander announced a resolution this afternoon at a bus stop outside City Hall, joined by representatives from Transportation Alternatives, the Straphangers Campaign, Riders Alliance and Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled.

With countdown clocks already available in many subway stations, Lander and advocates say bus riders deserve the same convenience, and that not everyone has access to a cell phone or the Internet before catching a bus.

“New Yorkers are an impatient people,” said John Raskin, of Riders Alliance. “We are not good at waiting. But we are much better at waiting when we know how long we have to wait.”

Lander’s office estimates that the counters cost between $4,000 and $6,000 to purchase and between $1,000 and $1,600 to maintain each year, based on figures from other cities with bus countdown clocks, including Washington, DC, Boston, Albany and Syracuse.

The MTA has argued that countdown clocks at bus stops provide marginal benefit to riders at relatively high costs, and is focused on rolling out its BusTime program citywide by the end of next year.

By that time, Lander would like a plan for bringing countdown clocks to the city’s 3,300 bus shelters. The route to achieving that goal is murky; Lander introduced the resolution to start the discussion.

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On Friday afternoon, the New York State Thruway Authority announced the 28 members of the Tappan Zee Bridge Mass Transit Task Force. Unlike the announcement of the committee that picked the winning bid to build to bridge, the task force announcement was made by the Thruway Authority, not Governor Cuomo himself, who has otherwise put himself front-and-center as the project’s public face. The announcement came nearly four months after the executives of Rockland, Westchester, and Putnam counties agreed to the task force in exchange for signing off on the Tappan Zee Bridge plan.

Proposal 1, the recommended option for the new Tappan Zee Bridge. Transit sold separately. Image: Thruway Authority

The panel has no binding authority, but if better transit along the I-287 corridor can be salvaged from the Tappan Zee project, the path forward starts with the transit task force. It includes local and county electeds, transportation professionals, and representatives of the business community — but strangely fails to include anyone from the MTA, which was one of the original conveners of the Traffic and Transit working group in the Tappan Zee planning process that Cuomo abandoned last year.

Sources had indicated to Streetsblog that members of the task force would be named after the bridge’s design selection committee had made a recommendation to the governor, because some individuals would serve in both groups. The task force and the design committee have nine members in common: DOT Commissioner Joan McDonald, Deputy Secretary for Transportation Karen Rae, Mark Roche of consulting firm Arup, Thruway board member Brandon Sall, Robert Yaro of the Regional Plan Association, village mayors Tish Dubow and Drew Fixell, and county executives Rob Astorino and C. Scott Vanderhoef.

Before the deal was reached to let the transit-less bridge move forward, a number of counties and towns had called on Cuomo to restore transit to the TZB project. One of the good signs in Friday’s announcement is that they are represented on the task force. The task force members who had signed on to TZB transit efforts led by the Tri-State Transportation Campaign (represented on the task force by executive director Veronica Vanterpool) include the county executives, Tarrytown’s Fixell, Assembly Member Amy Paulin, and State Senators David Carlucci and Andrea Stewart-Cousins.

On the other side, task force member Marsha Gordon of the Business Council of Westchester County was a major cheerleader for Cuomo’s transit-less bridge proposal, and Assembly Member Ellen Jaffee was an early endorser.

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